Reaper of Souls Legendary Items: Beta Gallery #3

Posted By: December 4, 2013

Here’s another big batch of freshly-found orange and green delights. It’s our Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls legendary item gallery #3! (See gallery #1 and gallery #2 if you missed them.) As with the others, all these items were actually found in game; some by our various IncGamers testers, others by friends, others seen in streams and or in chat (people regularly post their new leg finds in the general chat in the beta).

Makes fat little piggies?

As the Reaper of Souls beta continues, our understanding of the legendaries and the overall item game is coming into better focus. Our first legendary gallery drew a lot of negative comments from people who seemed to be expecting most of the new RoS legendaries to be themed and largely non-random, with numerous stats you don’t see on Rares. That’s not the case, and now that we’ve seen hundreds of legendaries in RoS, they’re not so complicated. Legendaries are basically Rares, with the potential for slightly higher rolls on some of the affixes (mainstat and vit, mostly), plus one special, orange-text legendary property.

These seem to be pre-set; the same legendary always has the same property, though there may be exceptions I haven’t noted yet. The utility of these legendary properties varies greatly, and presumably will be a chief target for balancing and tweaking during the remainder of the beta test.

There are very few properties left on legendaries that can’t be found on a rare of that item type. This was a big reason behind many of the BiS legs in D3 (Inna’s Pants, Mempo, Witching Hour, Lacuni’s) and that’s probably a reason we don’t see much of it anymore — to promote more diversity of choices for each item slot. There are a few that still have special mods; Andariel’s Visage with the “takes increased fire damage”, Cindercoat still has +damage to all your fire skills, but those are very rare. The vast majority of RoS legendaries have no mods that a rare of the same item type couldn’t get.

The mainstat rolls on Legendaries are almost always “smart drop” tweaked to match your class. Exceptions are class-specific legendaries which seem to only roll the mainstat of the class that can use them, but most legendaries that can be used by any class will roll with the mainstat your class would like most of the time. You do occasionally get one with INT or STR while playing a Monk or DH, and it’s always a bit of a surprise. This isn’t to say that all legs roll with mainstat; you get them without any stat, or with just Vit, once in a while.

Click through for a few more legendaries with specific comments about their special properties, and the whole gallery of 44 new legendaries for your viewing pleasure.

Selected Legendary Report

A few I’ve found and used, with varying degrees of success.

I was trying to figure a build or class that could really use this. How do you stay below 30% hit points without dying? It’s obviously not one that HC chars are going to really enjoy, but it’s not impossible to use in RoS since your character gets such a large health pool and without Life Steal you can’t refill it super quickly.

I’m curious to try this and see how much gold really falls. The Gladiator’s Gauntlets that make a dozen gold stacks rain down when you score a killing spree are very fun (if bafflingly unthematic), and these can’t make that much gold come from every enemy, but showers of coins are fun. Much more fun in RoS than in D3, now that there’s no Auction House and you can’t raise easy gold by selling your unwanted items/mats/gems.

This sounds cool, but it was disappointing and unusable on my Monk when he found it. 1) The “bloody explosion” is a total lie (for now). Monsters who trigger it die with a small nova effect bursting out from them. It’s a red nova, but by no stretch of the imagination could you call it a “bloody explosion.” 2) Even with the enhanced chance to Fear in the stats it wasn’t a common enough thing to be a strategic debuff. 3) Monsters run really fast when they are afeared, so even if they have DoT and die while briefly scared, they’ll probably be out of range of others when they die.

I got a five pack of Lacuni champions when I first tested this mod, and it was like they’d become Fallen. It took forever to kill them since 2 or 3 were always running off at a very high rate of speed. If there’s any use to it, perhaps a ranged attacker with a lot of AoE could enjoy it? I want to see the screen filled by frightened, exploding enemies. That sounds awesome, but not all classes have the play style to create it.

I’d be curious to see hwo this works with other debuffs; if you had a Confuse or Stun property on top of this… would enemies get both? Or would the more recent overwrite the earlier effect?

My Monk used the Burst of Wrath two-handed sword for a bit and loved the huge damage (I was landing 25m crits with Wave of Light, even without my other gear real optimized for damage.) but I couldn’t stand using it long term since it was just so slow. The graphic on the character selection screen was amazing, though. It looks like something I photoshopped in, or the kind of scene Hollywood sticks into every 3D movie, just because they can.

Or, as Chef once said, “Now I know how all those white women felt.”

Another example of removing special bonuses to individual legendaries. No more does Sun keeper have the big +Magic Find property. MF bonuses are gone from more items that had them specially, as part of the general decline in MF on gear in RoS. Note that the +damage to elites property remains on the Sun Keeper, so it’s just MF, not all special inherent mods.

Comments

Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed that most legendaries won’t have much of a theme, outside of their special affixes. That said, the affixes themselves look like a lot of fun, and I could definitely see myself planning a lot of builds around some of the affixes that have been shown so far.

That said, I also think that the image of the Heavenly Shard that just says ‘I need an icon’ is pretty funny.

That material doesn’t even exist, outside of the crafting ingredients. At least I’ve never found one. I’ve seen 2 other types of legendary crafting mats drop, but both had pink placeholder non-icons, and neither could be picked up.

Incidentally, those crafts that require a base item of the type? It doesn’t have to be white quality. Anything of that item type (below legendary) that you have in your stash will be used. Including rare. The game doesn’t give you any warning of that either; you could have a really nice rare in your stash, waiting for some other char to use it… poof, gone into the crafting requirements.

These items definitely whet my appetite for the expansion (and even the loot 2.0 pre-expansion patch as well). Playing self-found, I’ve been using the same weapon on my DH for almost a year (despite it being a Manticore with Int, it’s still the best I have) so I’m very much looking forward to an environment where self-found upgrades are not only possible but expected.

Mimics, slowing, etc…at the end those would be MINOR effect, if not they will be nerfed.
I must say…Paths of Exile simple/but complex crafting system+itemization in general, is FAR superior imho.
I don’t see any build changing changes in RoS stream, neither spectacular new mob mechanincs, neither nothing appealing apart from the “adventure/arcade/bonty mode” and here…….PoE MapCraftingSystem is FAR superior.
I hope I’m being negative and I didn’t see important things, today, sad to say, RoS is neither a day 1 buy nor a must buy.

There are a few build-changing items, at least. The Thorns set gives you a big bonus to Thorns damage, and there was a video a few days back of some guy steamrolling Torment VI (I believe), just letting enemies beat on him and die from Thorns damage. There’s gloves that make Shrines last for an hour; this doesn’t seem build-changing on the surface, but if you take that, stack up Cooldown Reduction on gear and grab an Empowered Shrine, then for the rest of the session you play like a CM Wizard, regardless of class, allowing for a skill build that focuses on powerful, high-cooldown abilities that suddenly only have cooldowns of a few seconds each. Also, there’s a crossbow that makes Strafe free, and according to a bunch of people on stream, Strafe-build is apparently now a thing. Also for Demon Hunters, the Danetta’s set bonus makes Vault cost 8 Hatred, rather than 8 Discipline, making it spammable. Also, the Danetta crossbow that Flux linked in legendary list #2 made vault deal damage to enemies you went through, and so presumably the other Danetta crossbow would add something else to Vault. In that case, you could probably play a Vault-DH, spamming Vault as an offensive movement attack rather than a ‘get-me-out-of-here’ utility spell. There’s a sword that gives you a 50% chance to get Nephalem Glory (a buff that stacks 3 times that blasts all enemies around you for some amount of time) whenever you blind an enemy, making Blinding skills more useful. Really, there are quite a few build-changing items. You might still just use them as stat-sticks, but there undeniably are more than a few build-changing legendaries now.

Also, in addition to build-chaning items, there seem to be a lot of ‘game-changing items.’ These I’m defining as items that don’t really change the way you build your character, but do change the way that you play and make decisions while fighting. For example, there’s a legendary that doubles your DPS for 10 seconds whenever you open a chest. This doesn’t really change how you build, but you’ll probably prioritize opening chests while fighting enemies a lot more than you would have before. There seem to be a lot of legendary effects like that, and while build-changing would be better, game-changing legendaries at least change up the flow of the game, making otherwise bad options more viable.

In comparison with Path of Exile, I haven’t made it to PoE endgame yet, but I’ve browsed the forums a lot, and a lot of people seem to complain a lot about the PoE crafting system. A lot of threads say that it takes forever to get Chaos Orbs and Orbs of Fusing (for getting 6Link armor and other such items), and that the chances of actually getting a good craft is ridiculously bad (for 6L armor, 600-1000 Orbs of Fusing seems to be the average amount necessary). Ironically, the advice which seems to come up most on the PoE forums is that instead of playing the crafting system, you should just hoard your orbs and trade them for good gear. Essentially, the situation seems to be mostly the same as in D3, except that D3 has an Auction House to buy gear on, while you have to use forums or 3rd-party cash sites in PoE.

As for PoE’s itemization, I won’t disagree with you that it’s better than D3’s, but at the same time, I’d consider D3 RoS’s legendaries to be better designed than a lot of PoE’s uniques. A lot of the PoE uniques have the same problem as D3, where the item is basically just a stat-stick (one of the most sought-after uniques in PoE, the chest armor Kaom’s Heart, is basically just a lot of armor and life stapled together with no other affixes). More of the PoE uniques feel relevant to builds, but at the same time, a lot of the ‘build-changing’ uniques don’t really feel bild-changing, at least to me. For example, there are several uniques that give you bonuses when you’re at low health (bonus damage, bonus MF, etc.) However, most builds that use them go primarily Energy Shield-as-life, and keep the actual life stat low, using Blood Magic skill gems with auras to keep Life always in the low. Because of this, even though the affix itself (gimp your life to buff your stats) seems like a ‘build-around-me’ affix, in fact it’s more like ‘my health will never matter, so let’s use it to tack a few extra bonuses on.’ It doesn’t really feel build-changing, because you would never use it on a Life-based character, so the function is never more than an extra bonus for a negligible cost. To put it bluntly, these uniques don’t feel like ‘build-around-me’ uniques, they feel like ‘you’re going to build this way anyway, so why not throw me in too?’ items. While there are a few really build-changing uniques in PoE, I think that the actual number of truly build-defining uniques is probably on par with the number that exist so far in D3 RoS.

In the end, my job isn’t to change your mind. If you’ve looked at the RoS streams and were unimpressed, you probably shouldn’t buy the game, as you will likely not enjoy it fully and will be depressed that you wasted your money. At the same time, I believe that you are wrong about the number of build-changing items in RoS, as well as the superiority of PoE’s crafting system. If you are still around, I would suggest that you look at a few of the older entries on the diablo.incgamers.com main page. The videos with the Thorns build and the Strafe build should still be up (and, if not, they’ll only be one page down on Older Entries). The other RoS legendary lists showing the other items I’ve listed should be somewhere around there as well.

PoE’s itemization might be slightly better, but it’s likely not because of the uniques.

While the other reply has already covered a lot of this (cheers!), I just want to add:

PoE’s itemization generally seems to come down to “grab life+resists and lulz a lot.” The legendary drop rate isn’t great, and the amount of build-defining legendaries is relatively low. I’m not speaking in terms of comparison to D3 or RoS, but just in general. The best legendaries are stat sticks, and the reliance of many builds on 5L/6L, combined with the fact that 5L/6L can only be obtained on certain slots, makes this a nightmare. Want to use Voll’s Protector (one of the few build-enabling legendaries in PoE?). Well, if you found a low-level one, you can’t 5L/6L it anyway, and it’s got no resists or life, so now you REALLY need resists and life on your other gear.

Due to the terrible drop rate of Exalts, the pure-RNG of Jeweller’s Orbs and Fusings, the annoying socket coloration issue that means you can’t off-color socket consistently with Chromatics, the amount of junk affixes in the game discouraging the use of Chaoses/Alchs/Regals/etc., it’s really not crafting but “sustained RNG trolling.”

While I like what PoE is trying to do with (some of their) items, it’s far from a panacea of good game or itemization design. If nothing else, I am annoyed that just obtaining life+resists on all gear pieces is more effective for all stages of the game than actually doing anything interesting with your gear or build.

Not to take the discussion away from D3 or anything, but what you named (stack life+resist) was why I stopped playing PoE. Particularly, most people said to stack life+resists in passive tree and ignore damage unless you were a mage. Combined with the boring uniques and ‘sustained RNG trolling’ (which is an excellent way to put it), I lost interest. The fact that the new Zelda came out also contributed a lot.

Anyway, back on topic for D3, I think that the best way to do the new legendaries would be to have some legendaries as mostly static, themed items, while other legendaries would be as many are now, like rares except with a special affix. However, I really hope that all legendaries have some kind of special affix. I see a number of them without those affixes, such as the Sun Keeper, and I would be really disappointed if some legendaries just didn’t have special stuff. That said, I like a lot of the special affixes that exist so far, and am hoping to see more great stuff in the future.

Btw…Why do monks wear incredible weapons on their hands all the time until they start fighting monsters?
That’s the metaphorical point of the game. It’s an astonishing looking game, with equal huge monetary support, but do not have the SOLID core it needs.(name it, itemization, build diversity, appealing high end, good support no patches for decades, etc…)

And here we are day after day only by HOPE and the game’s name, DIABLO.

Combine the pandemonium loop with the WD mask that changes fear procs into stun procs. Now casting horrify stuns all enemies around you instead, and when they die they stun everyone around them as well!

Combine the pandemonium loop with the WD mask that changes fear procs into stun procs. Now casting horrify stuns all enemies around you instead, and when they die they stun everyone around them as well!

Question is whether that will still allow the explosion to trigger. You are now stunning enemies after all, not fearing them.

Yeah I guess it all depends how it is handled. Is the fear proc eliminated and replaced by an actual stun proc, such that the enemy is not even considered to be “feared” anymore? Or does the game still consider the enemy “feared”, and just changes what effect that has on the monster?

Im sure there will be tons of theorycrafting questions like this to ponder with all the new legendary/skill interactions possibilities. Some will likely synergize more than others. One thing I noticed on the ZiggyD DH perma-strafe build video Flux linked to the other day was that legendaries which actually proc’ed a skill proc’ed not the base skill, but rather then chosen rune if that skill was one you had on your bar. That sounds promising and definitely opens up more possibilities for any legendary with skill triggering proc effects.

There was a video of a guy doing Torment VI with Thorns? Wow. This guy must have been so happy seeing this affix working after those years. It won’t last long though. Enjoy while you can and prepare for a nerf. Thorns will be useless in RoS final. Blizzgnam style.

a, I the only one thinking that these new legendaries with no special theme esp. the crafting ones with all random prop. are just stupidly ridiculous(for example what was wrong with the old hallowed shueld with fixed all res & chance to block),they better come with a new name to call them because they don’t feel like legendaries to me